Welcome to the HCL blog! We work on enabling Financial applications over the novel architecture of NPS.

The NPS architecture holds solid promise for financial applications! Databases are increasinly becoming bottlenecks for scalaibility. This is particularly true of financial domain where the data-volumes are increasing by leaps and bounds. Portfolio management and Risk management software have to analyze this massive volume of data to make ""intelligent" decisions.

Let me list some of the interesting financial applications here. There are obviously more and more. Here is a small list:

• Calculating Implied Volatilities of the underlying in the current market

• Consider an investment bank selling options and futures. If they price their options wrongly, market onlookers would just simply make risk-free profits out of it. So, the banks need to examine the trades happening in all the exchanges to arrive at the implied volatilities of the underlying security before pricing a derivative based on that security. This involves analyzing live and historical exchange data and this is where the NPS holds a lot of promise.

• Calculating historic volatities of various assets by examining historical data

• Historic data is useful only when it comes to recent history. The stock price modeling fundamentals assume that old stock prices and the path with which a stock price has been attained is immaterial. The Hull book(bible of finance) recommends a period of 21-days for inferring any meaning out of historical data.

• Historical volatilities can enable a user to see how volatile an underlying security is! Highly volatile assets tend to change prices (upwards or downwards) by huge amount and are quite un-predictable.

• Calculating historic volatilites for comparing and contrasting companies involves analyzing and sorting historical data and is a huge work! On the NPS, we were able to arrive at historical volatility chart with a click of a button on your Excel spreadsheet! As simple as that! Above all, one can leverage the MPP architecture without forgoing code-readability -- which is a very important factor when it comes to software maintenance.

• Pricing stock options

• Binomial, Trinomial, Monte-carlo simulations are common ways of pricing stock options! All these can be computed over the top of the NPS appliance itself and viewed in a spreadsheet

• Managing portfolios

• Consider a portfolio of stock options and stocks. This one has to remain delta-neutral and this requires the market be quite closely watched - Sells and Buys have to be triggered automatically on examining stock price movements

At HCL, we are developing these algorithms over NPS and are seeing impressive performance!

If you happen to come to NUC 08, you are most welcome to visit our stall to get a glimpse of what we are upto and how it can be useful to you.

Watch out this space. We will be posting more here.

TDWI is always a great conference. Not only do I get to see a bunch of good friends but I also get to hear about all the latest trends, technological wonders, challenges, and success stories swirling around business intelligence and data warehousing. There appears to be no slow down in this industry's economy!

I noticed that partnerships between the vendors are booming as well --  I like this trend. These partnerships run the gamut from technology company to technology company, to systems integrators with technology companies, to solutions providers and resellers with technology companies. The booths were filled with logos and case studies documenting these. This means that customers get deep expertise and good integration in all facets of their BI or DW projects.

My own talk on Tuesday with Barry Devlin dealt with the need for this type of collaboration -- especially between the different technologies. Out talk, titled "Navigating the Next Fork in the BI Road", dealt with how companies can get more business value from their traditional BI environments, how they can develop operational BI capabilities, how collaborative technologies can enhance the BI experience, and finally, how BI now needs to reach up the decision value chain to the strategic decision makers. We had a large and lively audience who contributed thoughtful and useful content. Many thanks for your input!

I gave a talk on Wednesday on BI software as a service (SaaS) to an equally lively bunch of attendees. We discussed BI SaaS pros and cons, challenges and success factors, and the guidelines for bringing these novel BI capabilities into your organization. Lots of good discussion on integration issues, data control and privacy, architectural needs, pricing considerations and ROI for BI SaaS. It is a session that I will be doing again for TDWI in the Fall conference.

Finally the Expo was as exciting as it always is -- the energy surrounding each vendor's booth was palpable. There were new companies being launched, new versions of technology being demonstrated, and new customers being listed and discussed. I found it to be as informative as ever -- I think some of the best stories come from just "walking the floor". Netezza's booth was one of the highlights for me -- when I could get to it. They always seemed to be crowded with attendees but I was able to get information on NPS and a few of their customers before moving on!

Hopefully you can be a part of the next conference in August. I guarantee it will be a great time for all, in a great locations - San Diego. Be sure to look me up if you go!

Yours in BI Success -- Claudia Imhoff